long distance
by Feral Phoenix
Summary: Garlot bids goodbye to his first love. — C route spoilers.


long distance

DISCLAIMER: Blaze Union © Sting. I seek to gain no monetary profit from this writing.

_(Show__ me__ that__ and __destroy__ me. _– cut this neverending lifeline)

It comes, then, the familiar sensation of his lance piercing through flesh—but this is not the same. There's less resistance than he would feel attacking an armored enemy, less resistance even than punching through an unprotected body. Nessiah is insubstantial. His bones break like matchsticks.

Perhaps it's that his legs have started to give, but he slides in down the shaft of the red spear until he's collapsed up against Garlot's chest. Blood and scraps of bone and flesh decorate the metal in swirls, and there is warm lifeblood starting to run down both their bodies, and Garlot feels suddenly sick in a way that he never has before.

Nessiah is a wreck. It's not just the fatal wound, not just that he's still skewered straight through the middle and dying. His body is feverishly hot, his pale skin is translucent with sweat and with panic, his hair and clothes disheveled. Perhaps, perhaps, with his mind splintering away to nothing he's lost the will to even take care of himself over these past weeks.

He made a soft sound—a horrible soft sound like a death rattle, like a sob, like an animal choking—when he was pierced through, but now he is silent, too-hot hands pressed against Garlot's chest, face upturned. And because Garlot devoted time to being able to read Nessiah with only the aid of the lower half of his expression and his body language, he can see the hazy confusion plain and clear. He no longer understands what is happening to him.

And even though Jenon's loss is a half-healed wound yet, even though the whole of Garlot aches with the absence of him, he cannot help but _remember__—_

Remember the feel of his heart racing so fast at his first sight of Nessiah he'd been afraid it might burst, his face inexplicably gone flush, that smirk doing terrible twisty things to his insides—

Remember an early morning watch when they had sat nestled in close against the cold on the ramparts, Nessiah shivering not against the chill but the shrieking night terror he'd woken from—

Remember Nessiah's tiny hands on his shoulder and arm, that soft touch the _only_ thing that had kept the madness bubbling up in him from spilling over as they had stood facing the fires consuming his birthplace—

Remember the night before the attack on Ishnad, the riverbank and the fireflies and the things Nessiah had told him, the black and dripping secrets of a world a hundred lifetimes away, the honest words—quite probably the first and the last—Nessiah had given him in his plea for help, Garlot's own loss for what to do, the sharp tangle of their arms and their bodies and his untouched lips offered up to a dead boy—

—and it hurts, and it hurts, and he feels ill down to the marrow of his bones.

The time for being torn in two directions has passed—Garlot should know by now that he cannot waver in his choice—but even though he will defend what he has chosen to defend and a corner of his mind cries for _Jenon, __Jenon,__ Jenon_, he can barely breathe.

Because, he realizes with the sharp agony of a blade through the ribs—because he loves this broken man in his arms, loves him with every breath and every drop of blood, and those feelings are just one more thing he can shoulder no longer on the path he's chosen.

But because they are here and alone in the field of white flowers and because his heart will not be denied now in this last of moments, he allows himself to lean inwards and down and covers Nessiah's mouth with his own. He tastes blood; he tastes sweat and tears and dirt. His heart is screaming at him. The emotions he should have killed are a choir of condemnation. It is only their second kiss—it is only the second time Garlot has ever kissed anybody—and this is a kiss of farewell.

In the next moment, he straightens up and steps back and wrenches his weapon back, pulls it free. The broad base of the spearhead crushes bone and it shreds organs, tearing through muscle and skin and mulching them into an ugly bloody mess. Nessiah's expression twists into a snarl of pain—he coughs up blood, heavily, so that the spray mists like crimson dew against Garlot's breastplate—and his body sags and crumples and vanishes like heat haze.

All the strength goes out of Garlot's body, and he lets the tip of his lance hit the earth as he closes his eyes and turns his face to the sky.


End file.
